Today I want to continue discussing how to leverage Facebook for your church, business or ministry and talk about promoted posts. This is a fairly new feature of Facebook and one that you may not have even noticed. I’ve talked in the past about the importance of your business, ministry or church having a Facebook page (you can see the Facebook page for my campus HERE). On your Facebook page, you post to the Wall and now you can make sure even more people see what you post. Enter: promoted posts. Below is a post I just posted on my church’s Facebook page:

Notice in the bottom right, that I have promoted it for $10. I could promote it for $20 to reach more or $30 to reach even more people. Right now, I’ve got it set to be seen by about 2000 people. How is this beneficial? If I do a post (like the one above to promote our new message series beginning this Sunday), it may be seen by 2o0-300 people just naturally, but if I really want to reach a large audience (including friends of people that have joined our page), then I can promote it and guarantee that it is seen by lots of people.

Please note: You don’t want to do this for just any post, internal/family talk, pray for sister so-and-so posts or anything that is just something for your church’s eyes to see. However, when you’re trying to reach a new audience and truly use Facebook for outreach (like we talked about in my last blog post), then you may want to consider promoted posts. The following is a promoted post I did for the Sunday after the Colorado movie theater shooting:

The following post shows me promoting our Supernatural series and as you can see the promotion wasn’t complete yet – we still had money left to spend.

My hope is that you will use this wisely and strategically. Don’t promote everything, but when you’re launching a series, have an event (like a river baptism that I recently promoted) or you have a special Sunday coming up where you’re going to present the gospel strongly and you want as many people to be there as possible – then use this new feature of Facebook. You can read more about promoted posts and get training from Facebook HERE.

*** Please note: Implied in my last post and this post is that we invest heavily in reaching the lost in our community. I have an advertising budget and an outreach budget. I use both for Facebook ads and promoted posts. Do I want our people to invite people? Absolutely. I love what Larry Osborne has to say about that in his book Sticky Church. It’s just that I’ve always been a both-and kind of guy. I want our people to invest and invite (which we teach), but I also know that we can reach even more people by leveraging Facebook to it’s full potential and when I stand before my God one day, I want to be able to hear “Well done, good and faithful servant. You did everything in your power to reach people and introduce them to me and share the gospel.” I pray the same for you. Now go: leverage Facebook for the Kingdom!